Race is on to use up Sisonke vaccines

• Wider criteria allow more people to benefit • Study must close before national rollout starts

Long queues of health-care workers snaked through designated Covid-19 vaccination sites on Tuesday as researchers raced to finish the Sisonke study to vaccinate health workers before the national rollout begins on Monday.

The study, which aims to administer 500,000 Johnson & Johnson (J&J) single doses, fell behind schedule after SA’s medicines regulator temporarily paused use of the shot while it investigated US reports of a rare blood-clotting disorder.

The pause not only delayed provision of the shots but also stoked anxiety about vaccination among health-care workers and led to a drop in demand, according to Medical Research Council president Glenda Gray, one of the study’s co-principal investigators.

In a bid to boost demand for the shots, Sisonke investigators decided last week to widen the criteria for eligible participants to the World Health Organization’s broad definition of health-care workers, opening the way for researchers, laboratory staff, care-home workers, and people working for multilateral health agencies and medical scheme administrators to get vaccinated.

“The two-week pause caused a lot of vaccine hesitancy. We were concerned that vaccine sites were closing at 2pm or 3pm and doing only a few hundred people a day,” said Gray. “We have to close this programme before the national rollout commences. It would be a logistical nightmare [to run the two concurrently],” she said.

Gray emphasised that sites would accept only eligible participants who had registered on the government’s electronic vaccine data system. People who did not meet the criteria for receiving a shot at this stage have been turned away.

By Monday evening, 395,230 health-care workers had been vaccinated at 95 sites.

The Sisonke study began on February 17, and reached its highest daily tally on Tuesday, with 18,979 vaccines administered by early evening.

Study investigators have been pushing the sites to step up the provision of shots, hoping to

reach 25,000 a day, said Ian Sanne, who is overseeing sites in Gauteng and Northern Cape.

Most sites are expected to finish their stock by Friday, but a small number will continue into the weekend. “We will do a hard stop on Sunday, with the exception of a deep rural site in Eastern Cape that requires three mobile units to continue vaccinating next week,” he said.

Most of the sites are at public health-care facilities, which stop dispensing shots at 4pm. However, some of the private hospital sites operate into the evening, he said. A limited number of shots have been made available to companies working in health administration, he said.

The Sisonke study was designed as a bridging mechanism ahead of the licensing of J&J’s shot after SA’s last-minute decision in early February to halt the rollout of AstraZeneca’s Covid-19 vaccine in the wake of a small study that showed it offered little protection against mild to moderate illness caused by the coronavirus strain dominating transmission in SA.

The government will begin the national rollout with shots supplied by Pfizer/BioNTech, after mistakes at a US firm contracted by J&J to make a key ingredient halted the dispatch of its shots from manufacturers around the world, including from SA’s Aspen Pharmacare.

Health minister Zweli Mkhize said on May 2 the first batch of 1.1-million doses of J&J’s vaccine earmarked for SA could be released from Aspen’s facility only once regulators in the US and Europe give it the green light. He hoped this would be done by mid-May. There has to date been no further indication of when this might be.